Compy randomly turns off
 

My computer randomly turn off as if someone pulled the plug. It usually happens in the night. The computer is 4 years old, so can it be some type of hardware failure? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

it went ni-night on its own! how cute.:)

Not when you are using photoshop. So many hours... agh...

probably Power Supply or heat related, I'm guessing the former. Try turning the machine off for a couple hours before you go to bed, then turn it on when you go to bed, and see if N hours from turning it on, it turns off.

s0be

Well, it is more of a restart, but like if someone cut the power, then supplied it again with juice.

Probably your motherboard restarting due to overheating CPU.

So I need ice?

I had that problem. It was definitely mobo, not sure about heat though.

I had almost same kind of problem few months ago, but on my situation I had to pull the plug off for a moment before it would restart. Bought a new power source and problem was fixed. But on this case I would suspect overheating too..
Watch temperatures!

One of my older pc's would do it cause of a crappy coded screensaver. It would go into powersave mode and then just reboot. Never figured out why, didn't care, and it only occurred with that specific screensaver.

I had the same problem, and I fixed it the same way, too.

Post full specs please. It's difficult to even guess without knowing what's in it.

I dont think it would be caused by an overheating cpu or similar. A 4 year old system wont have any hardware overheat protection, it only started appearing on boards in the last couple of years. So the only way an older system like that would shut itself down due to overheating issues would be if you had MBM or similar software set to turn the system off once it reaches a certain temperature. Otherwise it would just get hotter until it hangs.

That still wouldnt explain why it turns itself back on though...

My best guess is that it's power related, or there's a problem with the motherboard. Heat could be a contributing factor, if the psu fan isnt spinning, the psu could be running too hot (which means it wont handle anything near it's rated output). If the psu is cutting out, and the system is set to turn itself back on after a power outage (check bios settings), it probably is the psu.

If it cant turn itself back on after a power outage, then i dont think it's power related...Otherwise it would just shut down and stay off. In that case, it would more than likely be a fault in the motherboard.

well it could be other things-- my comp used to do this. It was windows crashing because of hardware issues, but i had blue-screening turned off so it would just restart. check if all the error things are turned on

control panel-->advanced-->startup and recovery-->check and see if restart is checked. also look for memory dump thats how it will BSOD

It could be either an overheating motherboard as suggested, so adding a fan or two, or generally improving airflow would help. Or you could turn your computer off and let it cool down during long periods of use.

Seocndly, and this has happened with my power supply, is that sometimes the wires get a little loose, especially at the Molex connectors, so any slight bump to the case would cause my harddrive to lose power for a split second, enough for it to crash my system and need to reboot it again. You can solve that by getting a new power supply, or getting a molex splitter and using that in conjunction with a good molex connector.

http://horsefly.trybalink.net/specs.jpg

It is a slightly modded version of an Emachine Etower 466i.

lmfao.
Maybe try smth like mbm5 to monitor the temperatures?

My brother's computer has similar specs. How many case fan(including your PSU fan) do you have? How often do you turn off your computer?

I have 1 fan, located right next to the power supply, which still works. I start up my compy around noon each day and shut it down around 1 or 2 AM.

Did you scan for spyware/viruses etc.?
Maybe some nasty prog is scheduled to reboot the system at a given time... (just a thought)

Only tracking cookies were detected the last time I scanned with Spybot and AVG, which was a week ago. This problem is older than 1 week.

I had a similar problem after adding a USB 2.0 card. Everytime I tried to write to my external drive the system would reboot. Worked fine with the built-in USB 1.0. I returned it and tried a different brand. Many days and many phone calls later, I was no closer to solving the problem.

Here is what I found: I have a Soundblaster Live Platinum. It requires two DOS compatible interrupt to be assigned to it like the really old sound cards did, wayyyy back when. Anyway, when I added the USB card, there were no 'floating' interrupts left on the PCI bus so it 'shared' interrupt 5 with the sound card. So, everytime the two things tried to operate at the same time, the system would re-boot.

So have you added or replaced ANY hardware recently?

adding to what atmo said about heat; the only way it would be a heat problem is if it got SO hot that a chip actually ceased to function because of it, and it flipped out. but since it's such a old computer i seriously doubt this would happen. if you just installed dx9.0b it may be your videocard throwing up all the information it cant handle back to where it cane from and then the computer flips out. i've had weirder things happen.

when i was having driver problems with my geforce card that happened...drivers w/sound card were crashing it

i had a problem like this, it turned out i had too little ram for all the crap i was running, so i got more.

yeah, you might wanna shell out $150 to upgrade the majority of your system.